


scratches on the wooden bedpost

by thespiritscalling



Category: Newsies (1992), Newsies - All Media Types, Newsies!: the Musical - Fierstein/Menken
Genre: Demon Deals, Gen, Monsters, Not Quite Real, Supernatural Elements, both of the aforementioned are kind of -ish, it's weird but in a good way
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-19
Updated: 2017-10-19
Packaged: 2019-01-19 09:48:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12408015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thespiritscalling/pseuds/thespiritscalling
Summary: When he comes across a bed, finally, somewhere in this mess of rooms, there is a series of scores down the side of the wooden frame- made by claws, or shadows, or one of the other monsters that has made this home its nest.He counts thirty-seven. The shadows in the room whisper to him:it is you who makes them. it is you who counts the years.





	scratches on the wooden bedpost

“Come on,” croons the burning boy, “just one syllable. _Yes._ ”

“No,” David says. “I can’t.”

He can’t because there’s something he has to do but it’s not entirely _clear,_ everything has been muddled and twisted in his mind until he has to sort through knots just to say something comprehensive.

Fire swirls around him, brighter and brighter and brighter, puncturing the skin of his chest and blowing smoke into his lungs and his throat and his mouth. It’s suffocating, yet still he breathes. David breathes and coughs and listens to the burning boy’s laugh echo ever _louder,_ despite the volume already hammering into his eardrums.

“Stop,” he yells into the laugh. “Tony, _please._ ”

“Names,” the fire hisses at him. “Names, names, names. They do nothing. I will hold your stakes for now, but you have been warned. All or nothing. The game is already on.”

The fire is gone as soon as it appears, and what’s left is a silent boy in the middle of the room. He looks at David, and for a split second all David can see is the ash that outlines the edges of his face; his cheekbones and nose and eyebrows accentuated by the traces of long-since burnt fire.

The boy lifts a single burning finger and presses it into the crook of his opposite elbow. The burn hisses and sizzles, adding only to the array of finger-shaped burn marks up and down his arms. When David tries to follow him out the door, the door leads him somewhere different. Tony does not want to be found.

 

The leather band around his wrist is what keeps him from throwing his fist out the nearest window and sprinting off into the woods. It connects to another one, far away (or so he thinks, although his ulterior motive for being here suggests that it is not as far as he might believe) around the wrist of a smaller boy.

David picks at it between his thumb and his forefinger and tries not to notice the way the colour matches every other sepia-toned thing in this house.

There are no mirrors in this house except for one; a single broken pane of glass that, like all other rooms, David has stumbled upon by chance and is likely to never find again. He saw his reflection then, not once but fourteen times from fourteen different shards, each giving him a slightly different image. Since then he’s imagined no change from his outgrown hair and dirty v-neck and jeans with holes ripped from unforgiving plants as he tore his way through the forest.

Nothing has seemed to change in the ~~months days weeks~~ time that David has been here. He runs his fingers through his hair every day and nothing seems longer than it did when he first opened the door. Despite the dust that flies into the air whenever David finds a spot to sit, he feels no less clean or healthy. It’s like he’s in a pocket where no perceptive time has passed, yet David will age with the house until he has become as integral a part of it as the floor he walks on and wears down every passing minute.

He has, just then, a mental image of a wrist-sized leather band resting in the corner of one of the many rooms, and a boy that looks just like him picking it up. That boy has one around his own wrist. He keeps walking, finding doors, never quite finding his way or his place.

 

David’s socks have holes in them. The holes themselves create shadow, which means that Jack can follow him- although Jack could follow him anywhere. Jack is like a conscience, coming to rest on his shoulder at the most unbearable of times. Or he will perch in the corner, sweeping his shadowy tail across the room to trip anyone who does not love him completely; for that is the way of Jack, and that is the way of the house.

When he next finds Jack (or, when Jack finds _him,_ because Jack cannot be found) David says to him, “Please let me leave.”

Jack’s grin splits his face. It never leaves, although sometimes it droops and his eyes turn black and David has to find refuge, _fast._ This is not one of those times. Jack lifts a darkly painted hand and claps David on the shoulder, pressing him into the ground below. “It’s simple, really,” Jack says. “All you have to do is say yes.”

The trouble with this is that David could say yes to anyone and radically change the stakes.

“I can’t,” David says desperately. “I need it.”

“Please,” Jack booms. He does not have a quiet setting. “Nobody _really_ needs one.”

David says, hardening his jaw, “I have to find my brother.”

Jack laughs. It does not help the ache David has had in his brain ever since he stepped foot on this property with tears in his eyes and sore lungs from screaming his brother’s name.

“Humans,” Jack says. “Always in a rush.”

David wishes for Jack’s ability to melt into the shadows, to become them and travel through them at will. Instead, he backs up and meets the scratchy wood that is the only colour he has seen in days. Weeks. _Months?_

A shadow takes his ankle and tugs it, dragging David forward along the unforgiving ground. David is on his back on the floor, staring up at where Jack is holding the hand of the darkness. Another shadow wraps around his wrists and pins them to the floor above his head.

Jack’s eyes slip over with a film of the deepest red David has ever seen. “ _Yes_ is your key,” he says. “You should know that by now.”

Jack melts and David lies on the ground. The shadows do not let go.

 

The first time David dreams, he is in the middle of a field. It is nighttime. A radio is next to him, an old rectangular one with a tall antenna and a tuning slider, and it spits a song David vaguely remembers in the form of static.

Lights: large and harsh and bright and overwhelming. David sees three feet in front of him and no more. They surround him like he is a beacon, or perhaps being searched out by helicopters that want nothing more than to swoop down and eat him between their blades.

And a figure.

David stretches out his hand, reaching for the figure in the distance. A silhouette in the light, he cannot tell if it likes him or is even _facing him._ Yet it reaches its arm back- _it’s about David’s size, stocky shoulders, a confident stance_ \- and David tries to push forward but his feet do not move.

He is glued to grass, which should tear, but it doesn’t. The grass stays as it is, never moving, grass-shaped cement that has swallowed his shoes and leaves him with feet that are stuck fast to the ground. This may not be a field after all.

 _Next up on the Story Of His Life,_ says the crackling radio announcer. _He is our Adam, eating the fruit. The apple is poisoned, Adam. There is nothing you can do._

_The sins will crash down around you._

David feels desperation surge up his throat and swallow him whole. The figure seems to be receding- not walking, just getting further away- and David has to get to it. He has to find out who it is. He has to see them, _one more time-_

_One more time._

The lights snap off in that moment, and David has the image of the figure glowing bright white burned onto the inside of his eyelids.

 

“You could always try the door you came in through,” Charlie suggests lightly. Anything Charlie ever suggests is light. He never raises his voice, never lets himself get angry or scared or anything less than serene. He reminds David of Luna Lovegood, except inhuman and ethereal. “If you can find it, of course.”

Charlie sits on the floor, legs out in front of him. David is across the room with a book- _On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin_ \- and he is scanning the pages for some sort of clue that he is not real.

He seems to be real. There is no evidence that suggests otherwise, disregarding the obvious- because Jack is made of shadows and Tony is made of fire and David can’t get out unless he tells them _yes._ But this all can still be real.

“The front door, however,” Charlie says, taking no notice to the fact that David seems to have ascended to a plane at which he cannot hear, “is the one you’d have the most luck with.”

David shuts his book slowly. The pages still seem to slap together as though he clapped his hands. “The front door,” he repeats.

Charlie nods. “The trouble with the front door is that if you even managed to get past the shadows and the fire that entirely could kill you, you’d have to deal with the outside. You don’t want to deal with the outside.”

David asks, “What’s outside?” and regrets it as Charlie launches into a description sparing no detail of exactly what trouble would befall David were he to step foot on the dead lawn. All the while, Charlie is light and happy.

In a way, he is worse than Jack.

“Or you could just say yes.”

The window that shows David the forever daytime of the front yard dims minutely. There is no sun outside; just a constant light that comes from just behind the trees no matter where David looks from the house. The forest is made of dry, bare branches that try to claw their way into the inside haven, and the grasses are overgrown and brown and cracked in half: much like he is.

“No,” he says, and his mouth moves automatically. “Never.”

“Okay,” says Charlie, and it is left at that.

It seems unfinished. David almost wants to say _put up a fight._ But Charlie is happy in his own world, and David must be grateful for the tranquility for just a little bit.

He puts the book on a side table and picks his way across the floor over Charlie’s array of legs. He’s not sure which of them, if any, are real- not that it matters, if none of this is real to begin with.

 

There’s a window in the next room he is led to. In the forest, he thinks he sees a person-  
but they are gone as soon as he blinks.

 

David is woken up in the middle of his fourth dream by a sharp combination of knocking and scratching on the door. As he slept, the room seems to have changed orientation, as there is now only one door instead of the original two and an extra window has sprouted.

He is scared of what he will find when he opens the door, because even his dreams have been loud, and all he wants is _quiet._ The shadows do not allow him quiet. He opens the door.

“Welcome,” says Jack, his smile ripping open the edge of his cheeks.

This room is one that David has never seen before (although it is quite possible he has never seen any of them before, as they change so often he may never be in one twice) and the majority of its space has been filled with a large wooden table.

Surrounding the table are most of the figures that David has never encountered, only heard about- varying sizes and shapes, some made of shadows, some made of convoluted rope and some of melted metal. These are the ones that come around when he is asleep, trying to escape, and make the noise that bleeds into his dream and offers no mercy.

Jack draws a chair with his shadows. David sits, feeling the whirling life of the shadows underneath his legs. He cannot bear to tell Jack that he’d rather stand, especially under the scrutiny of the council’s glowing eyes.

He fiddles with his leather band and focuses solely on that. The pad of his thumb runs over the soft side of the band and for just a moment, he can imagine that he is sitting in a tree next to his brother, feeling the branch beneath him sway gently with the wind as he laughs and kicks the boy next to him, just a nudge--

“State your case,” Jack says in his loud voice.

David sees a shadow creeping into his tree haven and leaps forward, propelling him off the branch and crashing into the shadow before it can think about touching his brother.

“I just want to go home,” he says to the council.

He tumbles to the ground still tangled with the tendrils of darkness. More erupt from the ground, the places where the blessfully green grass cast shadows, and if nothing else he will cover the shadows with his own body.

Someone in the council laughs. “This is your home now,” says a voice. David doesn’t know from which figure it comes.

Above him, his brother is still giggling in the tree, watching a bird land on a branch close to him. A shadow breaks free from David’s grasp and takes the bird in a screaming flash of feathers.

“I have to find my brother,” he says. “I got here because I was looking for him. He could be in trouble somewhere. Please, I need to get to him.”

_David is not letting the shadows reach his brother._

Jack is the only one David can still see. He’s made a wall of his shadows until it encases just the two of them, blocking out the rest of the council. David can still feel the shadows surging against his stomach and his chest, shooting out of the ground in the direction of the one person he wants no shadows to reach.

“This,” says Jack, “is why you say yes.”

“He’ll know,” David tells him. “My brother. He’ll see the difference.”

Jack’s shadows begin to fall away. David is not being surveyed by the council anymore: he is back in the room where he slept, on the chair in which he had fallen asleep, and he is beginning to wonder if this is him waking up just now.

“Is there really a difference, in the end?” Jack asks, and fades with the rest of the shadows.

David holds his hands over his ears and waits for the echoes to go away.

 

“There’s something really special about a human soul,” Charlie says conversationally, because everything Charlie says is conversational. “Everybody is drawn to it. It makes us stronger.”

This time, he is back-to-back with David, because David is tired and he has not found somewhere to sleep in many, many rooms. His legs are spread out in front of him.

David says, “I need it more than you do.”

Charlie hums. “Jack seems to think otherwise.”

David picks up his head, which is heavy with the weight of the lead and his soul and the sounds that never leave him. “You,” he says, and has a revelation.

Charlie, with his varying number of appendages and radiation of calm and serenity and otherwordly power, is just like Jack. He is dark. He is ruthless. He is the heart of this house, even more so than the shadows that seem to control every move of every being and every room inside this place: any one of the inhabitants can work with the shadows, the questioned morales that come as an effect. Only Charlie can work with the light and the philosophy and appeal to the _human_ side, and this makes him powerful.

“You are Jack,” says David, and that is what he means.

“I let Jack do the leading,” Charlie says, as though he is confiding in David a secret so dark and terrible the very fabric of the house’s skewed reality would peel back in horror, “because he’s the one who can pretend. That’s what he does. You wonder why he keeps the shadows so close to him, so much a part of him, it’s because he has to keep the guise of leadership solid and sure. Shadows are a disguise for Jack. That’s why he lives in them.”

“And you?” David asks, though he suspects he already knows the answer.

“Jack won’t touch me. He can’t. I am made of the things he is afraid of, yet he loves me.”  
If David did not know better, he would believe that.

“Still,” Charlie says, “we are both part of our own. There is separation. We are individual. We are dangerous, and you should fear us both.”

He says this all with the same happy tone. The dissonance is music to David’s distraught ears.

 

Sometimes, he does not see them for days on end: ~~daysmonthsweeks~~ pass by without a spark, without a hint of the other occupants of the house. David wanders, alone, finding something new and losing it the next minute.

One day he finds a CD player and a stack of his old favourites. The very first on the top is a blank CD, and all it plays is silence- real silence, not the fake silence that follows David around and ruptures his eardrums.

This is the first time the wooden floor has felt tears, and the shadows in the cracks scoop them up and whisk them away to be cherished before they can even leave a spot.

David knows Jack is here. He also knows that this room will forget as soon as he does.

He lives in the silence until the CD ends and scrolls back to a reset position, as most do. The _play_ button is still depressed, like there is still a phantom finger holding it down. David’s mind is that finger, because maybe if he presses play for long enough he will hear the silence forever.

Crashes and noise come back in segments- or, perhaps, thousands of invisible boys inviting themselves steadily back into the room. David is no longer with his silence, and the headache grows deafeningly louder.

Despite this, he is alone.

 

The first one David saw when he stepped foot in the house was Charlie, who had elected to wear the body of a small boy with only two legs and a pair of chocolate-coloured eyes that pulled him in steadily, like a fish on a hook.

Perhaps that is why David is in this mess: his weakness is small, brown-eyed boys that strikingly resemble the one he so loves.

 

Tony shuffles his deck of cards when he is not on fire. This is something David has noticed, among other things: the burning boy is either completely silent or as loud as Jack, he wears faded graphic tee-shirts with prints of old bands or book classics and carries an abnormally shiny pocketknife, and none of this changes when he begins to burn.

When he is not burning, he seems the most normal of them all.

David sits facing him as he deals out three sets of cards. This is a silent period, in which David knows he will get no responses to his questions. He picks up his cards and says, “You know, I was scared at first.”

Tony’s eyes meet his for a second and David is once again struck cold by the ash that is now whirling inside of them. “I’m not anymore,” says David, “now that I understand.”

Tony takes a card out of his hand and places it down on the floor between them. Ace of Spades: powerful, all-encompassing, _you should be scared._

“The thing is,” David continues, “I know you all want my soul. That’s been obvious from the beginning. But the more I stay, the less you all pester me, so I’ve started to figure you out.”

Ace of Hearts. A warning.

“You don’t talk when you’re vulnerable because you’re afraid of saying something wrong. When you’re on fire, when there’s no shadows and no one can touch you, that’s when you talk.”

Tony flips over another card, a ten of spades. When he looks at David again it is softer, the swirling ash becoming less of a tornado and more of a breeze.

“It’s okay,” David tells him, and it never strikes him until later that he is giving comfort to the burning boy who has regularly swallowed him in his flames. “We’ll figure out a way. There’s got to be someplace they can’t find us.”

Joker. _There isn’t._

In the corner, a shadow shifts.

David takes a card from his hand and puts it down next to Tony’s: Queen of Hearts. The continued reassurance goes unsaid, and David is pretty sure the cards are made of the same magic as Tony’s fire.

Tony’s last card is a two of diamonds. David isn’t sure what it means, or if it means anything, but a two is as vulnerable as the boy in front of him wearing ripped jeans and a _The Who_ shirt and looking at him like he’s made of miracles.

 

His brother is beside him, holding a cherry popsicle. The sun is high in the sky and it is warm and they sit on the grass, telling jokes and riddles in light of a warm summer day. David is wearing a shirt that matches the green of their surroundings.

“When is a chicken not a chicken?” asks his brother, wiping away a drop of cherry popsicle as it runs down the edge of his mouth.

David thinks for a short moment, sees the stars in his brother’s eyes, and smiles. “When it’s not on the road,” he guesses, and laughs when his brother shakes his head and cherry popsicle flies everywhere.

“Nope!” says his brother happily. “When it’s hungry.”

It never makes sense, but the lack of sensibility is ultimately the reason why David laughs so hard every time the answer is revealed. This is one of his brother’s favourite riddles simply because it’s so nonsensical. The answer to “when is a guitar not a guitar?” is “when it’s out of tune” and “when is a book not a book?” is “when it’s a vase.”

His brother stuffs his popsicle completely in his mouth. David leans back and stares at the sky, where it is almost too bright to see: clouds are small but fluffy, and the sky beneath them is a rich blue, the colour of the ocean at a tropical island and a coloured pencil that comes in a pack of thirty-six.

He hears the boy next to him say “Whoops,” and looks over to see him struggling with the full liquid amount of the popsicle he has just stuck in his mouth. Cherry-flavoured water dribbles from between his lips and down his chin. Still, his eyes are sparkling with clear excitement, and David can’t help but join in giggling.

 

The next time they proposition for David’s soul, all three of them are together. Tony is on fire and Charlie has three legs and Jack is _Jack,_ standing with his shadows circling his feet, watching David with an intensity that makes David feel like he is being picked apart.

Jack opens his mouth but David talks first: “My answer hasn’t changed.”

“Now,” says Jack, “there ought to be something we can do to sway you.”

“Let me go. No strings attached. I keep my soul.”

This is Charlie: “There are always strings attached.”

David scoffs. “Why do you all live here? This place has no beginning and no end, and you’re all just doomed to wander here gambling for any human soul that has the poor luck to get stuck.”

Jack gets very close to him, and the entire room seems to glow brighter with the intensity of Tony’s fire. “Because,” Jack whispers, and although the whisper echoes around the room David knows it is meant for him. “Human souls are our high.”

Jack’s breath is on his neck. David feels shadows begin to snake around his ankles; possessive, heavy, and not at all overwhelming. “We,” Jack breathes, “get drunk on things like you. And we like it.”

Charlie is there too, as is Tony, and they surround him in a complete wash of the senses. He feels the fire and the shadows and breath on his face, he smells the ash and the wood and the dust, he tastes the sparks and the mystery and the sunlight on his tongue, he hears nothing, and he sees four sets of eyes:

Jack’s, dark and shadowed and hungry.

Tony’s, where the ash has become a storm.

Charlie’s, warm and brown and inviting.

And his brother’s.

David breathes in the smoke and shadows and sunlight and for a split second, his brother’s eyes blink and disappear. He does not notice the leather band being slid off his wrist.

 

He finds out later, when he habitually goes to rub it and finds it absent from its spot on his left wrist.

“Give it back, please,” he tells the shadows, but they laugh at him.

 

Tony lays down his two of diamonds and Jack creates a bed from his shadows and Charlie is the kind of friend David has always dreamed of having.

David suspects that he has given his soul over to the three of them long ago.

 

“When,” asks Jack, “is a boy not a boy?”

David is upside-down, hanging by his feet from shadows in the ceiling, and his heart pounds deliriously as he ponders this. Jack speaks with a hidden secret pushing excitedly at the edges of his cheeks and mouth. He knows the answer.

“I,” says David, and then stops. “Jack, where did you get that from?”

Jack grins wolfishly- his teeth become full in the phantom light- and says nothing.

David knows that the answer to this is not the answer to one that his brother would give him. Jack is meticulous: the best strategist at the worst of games. Nothing David could do would cause him to falter, because nothing David does is a surprise.

_“Humans,” Jack had said once. “Predictable to their very last breath.”_

David’s very last breath has likely been in Jack’s mind from the very beginning.

Jack tilts his head, only adding to the illusion David is building of Jack as a wolf. “Do you know? _When is a boy not a boy?_ ”

David says, “Let me think about that and I’ll get back to you.”

His heart is pounding, but with exhilaration.

Jack laughs and sets him down slowly, almost gently. “Think on it, _Davey,_ ” he says, the nickname flowing like butter across his tongue. “You’ll have an answer for me.”

David, on the ground, sees Jack wink at him before dissolving back into the cracks in the walls.

 

It’s almost like he misses the shadows. They are mean, and they toss him around and jeer at him and _want him,_ but still: there is something he feels when they go, and it is strange and unwanted and feels like loss.

 

Cherry popsicle turns quickly to blood, and the sky is the colour of Jack’s shirt.

David cries his brother’s name until his voice is hoarse and he cannot speak anymore. His mouth is still moving but there is no sound. The name drops from the edges of his lips and mixes with the cherry-flavoured blood until it is swept away.

The last thing he had said to his real brother was “It’s going to be all right.”

They had been standing in a field, staring at the sky as though it were a map full of ink stains and ripped edges. Trees all around them were dripping of that same ink, creating ropes and tentacles of darkness that was unfamiliar and unforgiving. His brother had stood tall beside him. 

David had tried to navigate the ground while his brother navigated the stars, and while his brother got swept up in the stars, David fought the ground all the way to find him again. Neither had found the other, and only one had returned home that night.

His brother was a bird, never touching the ground for fear of animals that would capsize him at any moment. Animals stayed on the ground and the sky was safe. The shadow is not an animal: it, in itself, is another bird.

That, David tells himself, is how it got past him. He is the animal and his brother the bird, and when it comes to open air he is no match for the shadow. It steals his brother away as it did the bird before, and David screams “It’s going to be all right!” so that even in darkness, he is not alone.

There’s a tug at the hem of David’s shirt. “I know,” says the black-eyed version of his brother that hovers an inch off the floor. “It’s all going to be okay.”

The thing about the shadows is that no matter what form they take, David knows that they are such. His black-eyed, fanged brother is still a shadow no matter what David wants to think.

But even if it is a shadow, it is still his brother, so David closes his mind and lets himself pretend.

Jack, he thinks, is trying to win him over.

If it works, he gives no indication, but he grips his shadow-brother’s hand tightly and does not let go.

 

Stumbling across Blink seems like a mistake.

Blink is sitting cross-legged in the corner and at first David thinks he is a creation of Jack’s, from the amount of shadows that swirl around him. His eyes are closed.

“You’ve been here a while,” says Blink, so abruptly that David startles. “You’re not nervous.”

“I’m always nervous,” David says. “After a while I just forget that I’m not supposed to feel like that and it becomes a normal part of my life.”

Blink nods; this makes sense to him, and he opens his eyes.

They are cold and blue and covered with a thundercloud film. David recognizes this: he is blind.  
“Are you one of them, then?” he asks.

“ _Them._ ” Blink repeats the word with poison in his mouth. The shadows stir restlessly. “I used to be one of them. I cannot own a bias on your soul, nor stake a claim. I can drink the lives of the grass and the trees and the unfortunate souls outside the house, but not inside.”

There is a window in this room. David looks through the glass and takes in once again the broken grass and rotting leaves and burnt-out lives of the forest. “That’s you.”

Blink nods.

“Why?”

“I was human, once,” Blink says. His face softens and he looks reminiscent, thinking about something that did happen or something that could have happened. “I used to be loved. And I came here, into this house, and Jack and Charlie and Tony were all here for me, _hungry,_ and I- I wanted to go back to being loved so badly that I let them take it. I said yes.”

David wants to say something, but Blink holds up a hand. He is getting agitated and the shadows match, swirling so restlessly David thinks they are about to rip up pieces of the floorboards Blink is sitting on.

“They took my sight and they took my life along with it. And they told me, _we’ll love you now_. Is this what you want, David? Think about it. Think about yourself long and hard.”

David opens his mouth and says, “But you can see.”

“I see the life in this house and the lack of it. I can see your soul and your memories and I can see the way this house has held its place over time and I can see exactly what kind of _evil_ -” he spits out the word as one would a seed or a pepper flake- “resides here. I cannot see physically but I am not completely blind.”

He reaches out almost in a flash and grips David’s arm, his fingers pressing in to soon create a set of plum-coloured bruises, and his voice speaks with such urgency that it is impossible to look away or even breathe. On his middle finger sits a band of silver so familiar David can barely bring himself to think.

“David,” Blink gasps. “Get-”

And suddenly, it’s like Blink disappears.

It takes David a moment to realize it’s because the shadows that surround Blink began to invade his mouth and nose and eyes until the entirety of him was covered, out of sight, and in that moment David also realizes that his memory of Blink is starting to slip. The shadows are swallowing him whole. 

He decides this: the shadows are covering up a deadly truth.

The shadows never stop moving. They twist and turn around Blink like ribbons, holding him in place and keeping a solid wall between him and David, but for just an instant there is a gap where David can clearly see Blink’s eyes.

They are urging him to never look back.

The shadows close him over again, and David runs from the room. He does not stop running for a very long time.

The shadows manage to follow him the entire way.

 

Through some cruel, misguided fortune, David’s errant path brings him back to where he had met Blink. The boy is no longer sitting in the corner: a small pile of shadows has taken his place.

The shadows spit out an object: a small band of silver that pops into the air and rolls right to David’s feet.

Blink, he thinks, no longer exists to wear it. 

He slides it onto his own finger.

 

David seems to be crashing down around the house. For some, the metaphor would be inverted, in which the house would be falling apart around David and he is alone and scared, but David is not alone and the house is solid and he is the one breaking.

He finds no one as he runs, despite feeling their presences suffocatingly in every door he opens and every room he enters. The splintered door frames laugh at him, the knobs burn under his touch, and some rooms are so bright he can barely see as he storms through.

David does not know how long he’s been searching. He does not care: the fire is a part of him. Blink’s faded blue eyes do not leave the forefront of his mind.

“Jack!” he roars suddenly. He was not aware he could access this point of anger, nor that there was even an anger in his stomach to begin with. He needs an answer. He needs to know. This is something he needs more than anything else in his life. “Jack, you _fucking shadow being,_ get your fucking shadow ass into this room and talk to me.”

It never occurs to him that the reason they are hidden is because they are scared. Because all the while he has been a wanderer, he has been serene, scared, and static. He has been a casual acceptor of his fate.

The shadows pool into one corner of the room they are in now: long and rectangular and almost hallway-like, with no windows and and a single door that is at David’s back. He knows that Jack can travel through shadows and follow him anywhere, but he will be damned if he can’t keep physical escape to a minimum.

Jack’s form becomes solid, and the minute it does David grabs a hold of his sky-coloured shirt and pulls him close until they are breathing the same two particles of air, over and over and over again.

“You,” David says. This is not a revelation. This is a war. “You’ve killed him.”

Jack, despite this all and the cherry-popsicle heart slamming in his chest, smiles. “I am made of darkness, Davey. What would you expect?”

“What are you hiding from me?”

 

_David is young and running outside in the rain, trying to make it home before the clouds pour too much on him and he melts._

_“Hey!” yells a kid to his left, up ahead, with sandy blond hair and bright blue eyes. “Hold on a minute! We’ve got a roof.”_

_David looks up and judges the space between himself and his home versus himself and the kid. The rain gets harder, the wind more intense; David is about to be thrown to the side with a particularly strong gust. He elects to go with the kid and the roof._

_“I’m Ryan,” the kid says as David dries himself off with the inside of his shirt. “We just moved in.”  
“Nice to meet you,” David says, trying to rescue the impression Ryan must have of him. “I’m David, I live down the street.”_

_They become quick friends. Rain or shine, David and Ryan stick together, inseparable. They go to the same school, are on the same soccer team, and their parents take turns walking them to the little league games at the field across the road._

_“You blink a lot,” David observes. They are eleven. David is at Ryan’s house while his parents are taking care of a wildly sick little brother, and they are playing video games in Ryan’s basement. The colours on the television are vibrant and drill into David’s memory long after he leaves._

_Ryan says, “Do I?” and proceeds to blink rapidly at David until his best friend begins to laugh. This means his avatar gets swarmed by monsters without him noticing, and the game over sound makes them break the bubble, out of breath from giggling. The observation is dropped._

_Until: “Ryan, I swear, if you win this I’m going to kill you. You blink so much I wonder if you’re human.”_

_They’re conducting an eighth grade science experiment about the eye and staring at each other, mentally daring the other to break the gaze._

_“Fight me,” Ryan says. His grin is contagious, and David has to push down yet another spurt of laughter. There is a reason they were warned against being paired together but that is beside the point; if there were any opportunities for them to be together they would take it._

_“You,” David says, “are henceforth called Blink, because it’s all you do.”_

_Ryan laughs, and Ryan blinks._

_There is no part of David that does not love Ryan, from his stupid messy blond hair to the ring that he swears he got from a pretty girl back in seventh grade (David knows it’s from Ryan’s father, although the circumstances of Ryan’s father are not yet to be spoken of- Ryan is barely holding together as it is, so David offers his support as much as he can). There is no one else he can play video games with or tease so intently it feels like nothing could ever be wrong in life._

_Ryan goes missing two years later. David has never felt so empty._

_His brother is there, wise beyond his nine years. He holds onto David’s hand and promises that he’ll always be there._

_There’s a reason why the thundercloud eyes looked so familiar._

 

The connection is the breaking point inside David’s heart.

He screams, wireless and bodily and furiously, in Jack’s face, until particles of shadow begin to blow off of the ridges of Jack’s cheeks and nose.

He doesn’t even know what to say.

“You’ve killed him,” he repeats, over and over and over wildly and without abandon. “You’ve killed him, you’ve killed him, _how could you have killed him?”_

“I am dangerous,” Jack says, his eyes flashing black. “And you adore me.”

David does not flee this time, although he knows that with Jack’s black eyes come shadows so destructive they will rip the house from its foundation: for once, that is all he wants.

He ignores the purr in his chest from the word _adore_ leaving Jack’s mouth and focuses on the people he will never see again. _Because of him._

_(“We are dangerous,” Charlie says, “and you should fear us.”)_

“I will never,” David says, taunting. “I have never and I will never adore you. You are nothing to me.”

Jack has begun to lift from the ground, swirling with the shredded ribbons of darkness that threaten to tear David apart. David stands his ground. He holds his hands in fists, seeing the eyes of his little brother and his best friend and the thundercloud eyes that stared at him from between the very same shadows that continue to growl at him, and he does not move.

“When is a boy not a boy?” asks Jack. His voice fills the room and rattles the door frame and drives into David’s head until David feels his head begin to split into two. “Answer me, David. When?”

Charlie and Tony have appeared in the doorway, watching; waiting.

David’s skin splits open and becomes the wind and the rain that brought him to Ryan, the lightning that flashed as he truly looked for the first time at his best friend’s eyes ( _it was dark, they were in the basement, the xbox was waiting for no one but david could only see blue_ ) and the swollen clouds that sobbed along with David as he sprinted through the godforsaken forest and into this house, calling and crying for his brother.

( _Where are you? Come back to me!_ )

(Where are you?)

David has built a hurricane in this room.

_I am dangerous, and you will fear me._

Jack’s shadows dissolve one by one, cut apart by rain like bullets and blades and scissors cutting ribbons for a packaged gift.

Jack, though his voice still echoes and drips with danger and possessiveness and everything that drew David to him and every last bit of anger that pushed him away, whispers:

_“When he’s a monster.”_

 

The wooden room has been stained by water.

Each crack in the wall and split in the floorboards is surreal and terrifying; they are visible but not defined with a lack of shadows to do nothing but creep.

David breathes. He has screamed himself hoarse once again. His vocal chords seem to fail him.

He turns around, and Tony and Charlie look at him like he has their lives in the palm of his hand.

_(The only thing in the palm of his hand is a small strip of leather, broken from its loop.)_

“You,” Charlie says, with a waver in his voice that would have killed even the strongest of men, “are Jack.”

_(You’ve killed him. How could you have killed him?)_

David wants to say, _I didn’t know,_ but the words do not rip clean from his throat. Charlie looks at him with the wide, sad eyes of a small boy. Tony turns and disappears, leaving only the remains of a charred two of diamonds fluttering to the ground in his wake.

The leather band rests guiltily on David’s hand, David’s heart, and the space where he once possessed a soul.

 

“I want to find my brother,” the voice says.

“You could try the front door,” someone suggests.

 _King of Clubs,_ a card shows.

The field of brown that surrounds the house has begun to be replaced by grass that is the line placed between yellow and green, and the trees sprout buds that give it poisonous red flowers. The souls of the cicadas and worms and ants that once flourished among the wormwood begin to replenish.

It rains, it thunders, and wind sends the house spinning regularly into the sky. The boy says, “It was raining when this all started.”

The boy wanders. He opens a door only to find the room he is leaving is not the same one he walked through to reach the door. It is only more and more of a maze, and every day the suggestion of _the front door_ becomes more and more foreign.

The boy wears a leather band around his wrist.

 

David does not appear for a very long time.

When his world stops feeling like a dream and he can tell how far his hand is from the ground by the shape of a barely visible shadow on the floor, he stops the rain and the wind and the lightning and lets himself sink into the layers of the house.

David, like Blink once could, can see everything. He is a part of them. He knows why Blink said them with such venom, with such hatred.

Jack had done the same to Blink as David had done to Jack.

 _Retribution._ And now David is like Tony, like Charlie, like the ghosts of the loud boys and most of all like Jack.

He walks through a door and is met with the glowing eyes of a council he has become a part of. In the center of the room, on a chair made of ash and fire and what David wants to think is just a little bit of shadow, is a boy that looks just like him.

“Davey,” Jack says, stepping from a corner. “Glad you could join us.”

**Author's Note:**

> beta reading & all my love and thanks to my buddy raine, who is the literal best!!!! (<3)
> 
> I used my headcanoned real names for the boys, which you would probably know if you read the universe cause I noticed like six slip-ups after the fact, whoops, but basically tony is race and charlie is crutchie if that isn't obvious
> 
> anyway, I hope it was enjoyable!! I got the idea from a combination of other fandoms' fics that I read as a style I like to call "fever dream fic" because nothing _quite_ makes sense but it's okay because it's cool that way. tell me what you liked about it, or at least your favourite lines! I love hearing input from you guys!!
> 
> and also remember that I'm a-ok with getting prompts or ideas! comment or shoot me an ask on tumblr @/impalahallows, I'm totally open to suggestion!


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